I'm in my final year of university and living with four other girls. Three of them including me all get on like a house on fire but the last girl (who I used to be great friends with) has just made our lives a misery. I found out last year that she had spend months and months slagging me and a friend off to each other and from that moment I felt I could no longer trust her and did not want to be friends anymore but wanted to be civil to keep the peace in the house.

This year started off okay in the house but has got progressively worse. She wanted us all to go out drinking all the time and nip into town when we have been very busy and just not had the time at this point in our degrees - literally 15 hours a day are spent studying. She resented this because we were being 'boring'. Then it began that every time one of us went somewhere it was interrogation. 'Where have you been? Where are you going? Who with?' She has good friends on her course that she could do things with but we are not prepared to jepordise our degrees for the sake of a night out drinking at this stage in the year. She doesn't get that and is ruining her own degree as a result. Other minor yet rediculous things have happened in our home since then such as refusing to buy anything for the house and never bothering to clean. (We devised a rota so that each of us would have a cleaning job to do each week) and we have all stuck to it except her. The one time she did clean the bathroom, she used my shower sponge to clean!

We have tried approaching her but she has a filthy temper and is so unapproachable. She is very childish too and constantly behaves like a five year old and tries to demand our attention. Most recently, we have a tv licence in the home and the four of us never watch it because we don't have tv's and have no time to watch live streaming on our laptops. She has a tv in her room and watches it all day every day. We approached her to say we would like to cancel it but if she wanted to keep it, she would need to pay the remainder of the money herself. She calculated it at £60. She said she would think about it... Over the space of a month, we individually asked her on four seperate occasions and she never responded. Finally, the housemate who arrranges the bills asked her to pay the money that week or she would cancel it. Then she flipped out and had a screaming tantrum that we were not her bank and she did not see why she had to be the one to pay for it and didn't know where the £60 had come from. (She came to that figure herself and we watched her work it out on a calculator). She eventually agreed to pay £50 and has so far only given us £40. Throughout this conversation she threatened to shout at us (oh no!) and told us to shut up and then the conversation was over. I had a go at her and told her we were all in our 20s and she needed to behave like an adult and take some responsibility for once in her life.

After that conversation I was so so angry. She has made mine and my friends lives miserable and I just truly hate her now. When I leave university I will never speak to her again. I try to avoid her but being in the same house is just suffocating now. I move out in three months but I have literally reached the end of my tether and I don't know how I can cope being here. It makes me upset just to be near her. My boyfriend lives a short walk away but he is also in his final year of uni so I can't be with him all the time. I don't know what to do to make the home a bit more bearable. There is no point in telling her how I feel because she will have some sick little victory in her head that she made me feel that way. In her perspective, I rise above it but inside I feel really low about the situation living with her. What can I do to pull through the next few months at home? I've exhausted all my patience.

Last edited by snail on Thu Mar 08, 2012 4:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason:Added paragraphs to make it easier to take in.

Whilst I have every sympathy with you (I also had a hellish housemate when I was at uni - I think it happens a lot!) there isn't much you can do other than stay out of her way as much as you can. I would be as civil as you can be when you do see her, and just distance yourself from her without being rude. You could always do some of your studying in a quiet part of the uni's library if you don't want to be in the house. You only have to grin and bear it for a few more months.

God, she sounds infuriating! I'm not surprised you're hacked off. But Ragdoll is right in that you can't really do too much about it at the moment. It sounds like you've been reasonable and you've tried to get your point across in a calm manner, but if she's not having it then she's not having it.

With regard to the TV license, I would cancel it anyway and then when she kicks off, say that the licensing people must have got wind of it as there was no payment. That option isn't for everyone of course!

I know it's not going to solve the problem now but you're going to have the last laugh in the end. She's the one who's going to fail her degree, waste all that money and jepordise her future. Hide out in the library, keep on track, ignore this silly girl and her silly games. In a couple of months, you'll be the one laughing!

Go to Glasgow at least once in your life and have a roll and square sliced sausage and a cup of tea. When you feel the tea coursing over your spice-singed tongue, you'll know what I mean when I say: 'It's good to be alive!'"

I had a housemate like this in my final year at uni. She took drugs (pot mainly) and just lived really unsociable hours. She would go out with other mates, and come back at like 4 in the morning, come crashing in with all her mates and wake everyone up. They would smoke in the lounge, which annoyed the rest of us who didn't smoke, and they would get the munchies and cook all sorts of things in the early hours of the morning, meaning that when the rest of us got up, we were greeted with a dirty kitchen, all our pans and plates used, so we had to wash up before we could have breakfast.

In the end, two of us had enough. We tended to be quite early risers (for students, 9am is practically midday!) so we would get up, put music on and generally crash around so that this other housemate, who had probably only been asleep for an hour or two, would wake up. She couldn't complain though - it was daylight and we had every right to be up.

We also had enough with the dirty plates, and one morning, we put them all in the washing up bowl (with some nasty water, which was possibly taking it too far) and put it in her bed. She went ape crazy, but to be fair, she did try and wash up more often.

The crux of it all came when we started our last "term" after Easter. She got her marks back from her coursework and she had done really badly, and it scared her silly, so she started working round the clock, plus revising for her exams. But me and my friend didn't have exams as our course was totally coursework and dissertation based, so we were finished (as the coursework dates are before exams) before she was. We weren't complete bitches, but we did sit in the lounge chatting and watching TV, almost to remind her that she had messed up. It wasn't nice of us, and I do regret it in someways, but when we were working hard, she made it difficult, so we just didn't make it easy for her.

If you've tried talking to your housemate, and nothing has happened, then I think you have to fight fire with fire, unless you really think you can just let it go. She will regret it in the end - she will leave uni with a poor mark in her degree, and few friends.